On the last day of their junior year at Harvard, one roommate kills the other, then hangs herself. The press descends. A year later, a reporter searches for the real story.

For almost 20 years, Greg Torti has lived the life of a convicted sex offender—carrying a blue ID card with him at all times, avoiding schools and parks, living on the outskirts of town. It’s a just punishment for the crime, he says. It’s just that he didn’t commit it.

Was Dr. Alexander Mishkin, Hero of Russia, responsible for the Skripal poisoning?

Companies are figuring out how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the value of the physical workplace.

For years, a tactical police unit in Mount Vernon, New York, reigned with impunity—protecting drug dealers, planting evidence, brutalizing citizens. Then one of its own started covertly documenting the abuse.

Investigating a former NFL star’s new business: renting professional athletes to their biggest fans.

Ana Montes was a decorated U.S. intelligence analyst. She was also a Cuban spy.

How a Peace Corps volunteer turned a high school basketball squad into Afghanistan’s national team.

A respected anti-gang crusader shoots and paralyzes another man.

Its editors still live in different cities, still work different careers, and still treat Boing Boing as a (lucrative) hobby.

Culture profoundly shapes our ideas about mental illness, which is something psychologist Nev Jones knows all too well.

“Yesterday I was just googling, I was going on YouTube to see how to microwave pasta.”

13 women, a months-long trial, and a jury’s choice.

An essay on meaningless work.

Christina Kim risked everything to escape North Korea’s entrenched gender violence. She almost didn’t make it.

He’s an expert on Twitter virality, but not on infectious disease. Does he do more help or harm?

The United States, which took a forceful stance on other Arab revolts, remained relatively passive in the face of the kingdom’s unrest and crackdown. To many who are familiar with the region, this came as no surprise: of all the Arab states that saw revolts last year, Bahrain is arguably the most closely tied to American strategic interests.

A report on Bahrain, the Arab Spring’s most ill-fated uprising.

What the neighborhood of Higher Blackley in Manchester says about “one of the least understood and most discriminated-against groups in society.”

The history of a powerful and violent secret society in the islands of southern Chile.

On the death of a young reporter named Christopher Allen and the state of conflict journalism.

In their depictions of domination, the artist’s works, full of world-building and philosophy, do more than flip the script.

He rose from poverty to fame as a marathon champion at only 23. But was his fall from a balcony outside of Nairobi murder, accident, or suicide?

Nakesha Williams resisted help from social workers, friends and acquaintances, some who only knew her as a homeless woman, and others who knew of her past.

Real-estate mogul Charles Kushner had been cast out of power, found guilty of a strange bundle of crimes including “secretly setting up [his brother-in-law] with a prostitute, then taping the encounter.” His son Jared, then 23, was left to carry the ambition for the both of them.

I first learned about cloud lovers in a police report concerning a man who received a blowjob from a young woman and went mad. The man — let's call him Carl (police reports have the names of suspects and victims redacted) — was in his 40s, and the woman, let's call her Lisa, was almost 18. The two first met in the fall of 2003 at a local TV station that was holding a contest to find the best video footage of Northwest clouds. According to the report, which was lost when I cleaned my messy desk in 2005 (I'm recalling all of this from an imperfect memory), Carl, who was married and well-to-do, fell in love with Lisa, whose family was not so well-off, upon seeing her for the first time. He had a videocassette in his hand; she had a videocassette in her hand. He showed his tape to the station's weatherman (sun, sky, clouds). She showed hers (clouds, sky, sun). During the contest, his eyes could not escape her beauty. After the contest, the impression she made on his mind intensified. That bewitching coin in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Zahir," comes to mind. If a person sees this coin only once, the memory of its image begins to more and more dominate his/her thoughts and dreams. Soon the coin becomes the mind's sole reality. Lisa's face was Carl's Zahir.